A project initiated during an internship through Sustainable Oceans NSF NRT at the NOAA NWFSC under the supervision of Dr. Kristin Marshall.
This project will focus on investigating trends trends in Pacific Hake weight-at-age and whether and how this variability will impact the efficacy of stock assessment methods, specifically empirical weight-at-age.
Guiding questions are: 1) How does Pacific Hake weight-at-age vary across space and time? 2) To what extent do these trends differ between data sources used in stock assessments (fishery-dependent and -independent data)? 3) How does ignoring spatiotemporal variation in weight-at-age when pooling data sources together and interpolating missing values in empirical weight-at-age affect stock assessment estimates?
This work is funded through the NMFS-Sea Grant Joint Fellowship in Population and Ecosystem Dynamics.